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What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
I saw my first Mac shortly after launch, in an electronics shop. It was interesting, but way too expensive for me, it cost over 2000UKP, over $4,000, which, for someone earning around 15UKP a week, was a lot of money!
When I started full time work 3 years later, as a programmer, we had Macs in the office. The company wanted people to use Macs over PCs, if you needed a PC, you actually had to write a justification to the purchasing department! But IBM and HP PCs were actually more expensive and less capable than Macs (except for hardware expansion).
We had 128K Macs (updated to 512K) and Mac Plus, the 128K Macs had an external floppy interface and there were some external hard drives that could be plugged into that interface, the newer Plus and later SE versions had a SCSI port and used external SCSI drives. We got as far as the SE/30 for some users, before the parent company (Plessey) bought Hoskyns, one of the larges consultancies in the UK at the time and the IT arm of Plessey (for which I worked) was absorbed into Hoskyns and Hoskyns had a different policy and the Macs slowly vanished, as they grew old and needed replacing.
We had a lot of diverse legacy and current kit that I had to look after. At one point, I had a DEC VT100 terminal, DEC Rainbow, IBM PC, HP 125, HP 150, HP Vectra, a Mac Plus and a Burroughs terminal for a server I had to maintain, on my desk!
I went from an Amstrad CPC6128 at home to an Amiga 500 with an A590 Sidecar, which had a SCSI port, as well as the internal IDE drive. I would sneak spare Apple SCSI external drives home to experiment on (reformat on a Friday night on the Amiga, experiment over the weekend, return it to the office on Monday and reformat it for a Mac.
It wasn’t until the Intel Macs appeared that I actually bought my first Mac for home use. I was working as a guest lecturer at a German university at the time and with an educational discount, a 24" iMac cost about as much as a Core i5 PC with 24" monitor and all my Mac using friends kept saying how much better Apple support was for older kit than Microsoft’s… Unfortunately, that wasn’t true of the early Intel Macs, Apple dropped support for them a couple of years later like a hot potato.
Lion was the last update for the 24" iMac and support for that stopped 18 months later, around 2012. Interestingly, the Bootcamp side was supported by Microsoft until 2020, 8 years longer than Apple stopped supporting it, which is ironic!
When I went to buy a new laptop in 2010, I was looking for a quad core i7 laptop with a Blueray drive… Apple only offered dual core i7 and no BD drives, and the lower specced MacBook Pro was around 1,500€ more expensive than a high-end Sony laptop with the spec I wanted… So I went back to Windows.
I eventually switched back to an M1 Mac mini in 2021, as I was getting more and more disillusioned with Windows. I had already put Linux on my PC by that time, but I do a lot of phot editing and that is still a weak point for Linux, so I went with MacOS instead.
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Stephen was great. You guys should have him more often.
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Great reminiscences of the early days of the Macintosh on the show this week - a real pleasure to listen to!
My first Mac was a PowerBook 140, bought in 1992 when I was paid my first pay cheque from my first job after graduating university. I had used Macs at university, mostly SEs and SE30s, that were heavily in demand so it was a real pleasure to have one for myself (and portable as well!)
(Prior to that, I was an Atari ST user. The 520ST, complete with monochrome monitor, was a heck of a machine for the price - less than $1000, it was faster than the Mac and had a larger and higher resolution screen. The 70 Hertz display was great for work as it was flicker-free.)
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Is there any credence to Apple’s claim that supply chain issues are the blame for the limited number of Vision Pro headsets? Absent any corroborating reports - this strikes me as the very thing Apple might do to both limit expectations and have some control the audience for this device.
Personally - I don’t think this should be reviewed at all by the tech press for the simple fact that availability is so limited. People willing to spend $3500+ on a product without a review are a self-selecting group predisposed to want it anyway and overlook the deficiencies for the promise. The vast majority of people reading such a review are not going to have this device and will likely not have it for a year or so - at which point any review would be outdated.
Also - this is the second device that Apple has put out which requires an iPhone (the first being the Apple Watch). I find this interesting as half your face is covered anyway. Ostensibly - you need a FaceID iPhone for measurements, but can’t the internal cameras on the device do that? The requirement feels artificial - much like the requirement of an iPhone for the Watch. It seems like the paradigm Apple is moving toward is owning an iPhone as a minimum requirement for the accessories. Does anyone else see this as a trend or an issue?
Given that the displays are new, hi-res units, not seen on other devices before, plus custom chips, it could very well be that they are available in very limited quantities, for example.
I read a lot of reviews for products I don’t want or can’t afford. I like to keep myself up-to-date. I read the reviews of the new Samsung Galaxy smartphones, even though I have no intention of buying one, likewise the Pixel line. I still want to know what they are capable of, what they can do etc.
It is the same with VR. I see a lot of promise in VR and read the reviews of the headsets, fully in the knowledge that I won’t be buying one, because the technology just isn’t there yet. The VisionPro looks like a step forward to a useful VR headset, but it is too expensive and the technology still isn’t mature enough to provide what is really needed, but I still want to know how far the technology has come.
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That’s fair. However, the limited quantity of the device coupled with the knowledge that they are working on the next version (or, likely have a done) means that the reviews now will not apply for the future device. In a situation like this - I’ll likely care about what a subsequent device can do, not what the previous device did.
Again - this is me. It just feels odd that all of this hype is for a device that isn’t expected reach 250K units sold with a price tag 6X more (before tax) than the competitors. Hololens didn’t get this kind of coverage.
A Korean electronics industry website identified Sony a few month ago as the manufacturer for the advanced screens used in Apple Vision Pro and said Sony could only produce 100k to 200k individual screens per quarter.
How many units of Apple Vision Pro will be shipped? - THE ELEC, Korea Electronics Industry Media (thelec.net)
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Ok - so it’s not as contrived as I thought it might be. Thanks @ChrisKez for the assist!
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